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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9020863" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are assumptions here that are false. In many more-or-less democratic constitutional systems (the first three I think of are the UK, the US and India) there is no need for a referendum to alter the constitution. India uses special majorities; the US uses sub-federal legislative consent; and (famously) the UK uses ordinary legislation (though perhaps with limits on the operation of the doctrine of implied repeal).Also, in some systems of government - I'm thinking of Westminster-type ones and the US, but I doubt they cover the field - the executive has some degree of power, including what is in effect law-making power, that it can exercise independently of statute.So I'm a little doubtful of analysis that begins from a premise that is particular to certain systems of government. It's ability to shed light may be limited by the fact that it's starting point is idiosyncratic and probably amenable to contestation.But anyway, . . . .The Crew is a cooperative card game which is basically a cooperative variant of whist: there is an "auction"; and then there is trick-taking play.Sometimes, the auction in Crew is done "blind", in the sense that each player makes their "bid" having no knowledge except previous bids. In this way, it resembles bridge or five hundred, though the players are aspiring to help rather than hinder one another. But sometimes, the auction in Crew is done cooperatively: the players (subject to rules about what they can and can't say) consensually determine what each of them bids. Sometimes, the auction in Crew is done by one player ("the Commander"), subject to rules-governed input/advice from the other players.Spelling out the full form of the relevant rules would not be straightforward, but clearly they include power conferring rules - eg under certain conditions the Commander has the power to establish all the bids; under certain conditions the players as a whole have the power to consensually establish all the bids; typically, however, players have only the power to establish their own bid.The effect of a bid in the Crew is to establish a win condition, and these are far more intricate than those in bridge or five hundred - eg maybe the player has to win all the cards of one suit, or no cards in a given suit, or exactly three 3s, or exactly two tricks on a row, or whatever it might be. We could therefore say that the bids, in Crew, are rule-changing in the sense of changing what the win conditions are. (This is what makes the game challenging; whereas the challenge of five hundred or bridge comes from the fact of having to play against opponents when all have the same goal of, to speak roughly, winning as many tricks as possible.)I don't think it adds much insight to try and force this through a prism of legislative, executive etc - I mean, the standard analysis of constitutional conferrals of law-making power is a species of power-conferring rule, but likewise the standard analysis of a Wills Act is as a species of power-conferring rule (ie it confers a power on each individual to author a will that under certain conditions has certain defined legal consequences); so having identified a power-conferring rule doesn't tell us much about its place in a hierarchy of rules. My point is that the Crew is a pretty straightforward game, not at all radical by the standards of contemporary board and parlour games, that includes - when one drills down in an analytical fashion - rather intricate rule-changing rules (ie conferrals of power to establish the win conditions) which are a mix of unilateral, distributed and cooperative.I don't think that this way of thinking sheds much light, for precisely the reasons I've given above.What rule zero, as I see it used, means is that the GM has the power (i) to control the fiction, including by re-establishing as-yet unrevealed backstory; and (ii) to settle the resolution framework, both by making decisions about the fiction and also by stipulating mechanical means; and sometimes even (iii) to override any deployed mechanical means, eg by ignoring or altering dice rolls, by changing hit point tallies, etc.In other words, it's a power-conferring rule. And the power it confers is typically presented as very extensive, in the way I've just set out.I am pretty certain that Suits would have been familiar with HLA Hart's discussion of power-conferring rules, of the imagined game of "scorer's discretion", etc. (And I'm drawing liberally on Hart in my posts on these matters.)So Suits will have no problem with power-conferring rules. As I've posted, though, within his framework it seems very natural to say that at a certain point, the enjoyment of a power-conferring rule means the activity is no longer a game, because the power includes the power to dispense with less efficient means in favour of fully efficient means. And that is what rule zero, as typically presented, does: it permits that GM to specify the content of the shared fiction without needing to go through the process of negotiation, nor the mediate process established by the sorts of game rules that Vincent Baker (and I as OP of this thread) are interested in, ie that specify who can say what when. (<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=6537" target="_blank">Here's Baker</a>: "I don't see three different parts to mechanics' function.  I see one -- to help establish what happens, via who gets to say what.")Now, when you (Enrahim2) suggest that rule zero "does not imply changing the social foundational assumption for the shared activity", what do you mean? Does it confer power to change whose job it is to bring the snacks? Probably not. Does it confer power to change the list of options players have for establishing their starting resources (typically called "PC building")? Well, according to the canonical statement of rule zero in the 3E D&D books, yes it does!Again, I don't see any value in trying to force this observation into a framework of constitution vs ordinary law. All I'm doing is pointing out the sorts of powers that rule zero is frequently taken to confer, and relating them to the notion of lusory means as less-efficient means and hence constituting a voluntary, self-imposed challenge.It does not imply any such distinction, and for the reasons I've given I think trying to introduce such a distinction is obfuscating.The contrast between constitutions and ordinary laws is rooted in political history and political theory, and also connects to questions of government and administration in the modern state. None of those considerations are relevant to understanding RPGs.Of course RPGs can bust up if their social foundation comes undone, but that can happen just as much over a single dispute about how to read a cocked die, as it can over a GM's exercise of a power to tell a player whether or not they are allowed to play an Elf in this particular game.</blockquote>

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